Video Game, 2023
Tears of the Kingdom fell short of my experience with Breath of the Wild – despite being bigger, more ambitious, and more polished – in no small part because this version of Hyrule is one I’ve already explored. There’s novelty and nostalgia in returning to reimaginings of familiar areas, but the magical sense of pure environmental discovery was missing.
My biggest gripe with this generation of Zelda is that there’s often just enough friction to make me not want to follow through with something I think would be fun. I found assembling and controlling devices cumbersome enough that it was usually quicker and less frustrating to find an alternate way to get from point A to point B. Whether you’re traveling via glider, vehicle, or on horseback, there’s a lot of empty time before you arrive at a landmark you spot in the distance. The amount of time spent navigating through the menu discouraged me from engaging with the cooking and fuse mechanics. The concepts behind the shrine puzzles are very satisfying, but wrestling with the mechanics of putting your intended solution in motion is typically not; the physics system increases the time cost of trial-and-error.
I feel that Tears of the Kingdom’s sandbox gameplay is fundamentally at odds with its MMORPG-style resource-collecting grind. I felt disincentivized to use Autobuild or fuse powerful materials, wary of missing out on battery expansions or clothing upgrades. Instead, I found myself exploring on foot and button-mashing with suboptimal weapons when, ironically, the process of collecting materials would have been more fun had I felt less punished for experimenting with them.
The game’s concise set of environmental abilities (Ultrahand, Ascend, Recall) seems so powerful and all-encompassing that it’s astonishing they don’t utterly break the game, particularly in the case of Ascend. The interplay between Ultrahand and Recall is especially neat. The most exciting discovery of the game for me was realizing you could move an object into place, wait a few seconds, and rewind time to freeze it there. Recall also softens the blow of an Ultrahand mistake like a dropped object or a runaway contraption.
I loved the addition of cave exploration and felt that they got the flow just right: the excitement of happening upon a glowing Blupee on the surface, the opportunity to mine for rare gems on your way, scanning the walls for hidden paths, blasting through destructible rock, and finally the reward of a Bubbul gem. My favorite experience in Tears of the Kingdom was opening the passageway in the emergency shelter to find a massive tunnel system with chamber after chamber leading all the way under Hyrule castle, complete with a Stalnox battle and a full set of armor to find.
While the depths are based around the cool concept of illuminating dark areas as you go, in practice, the oppressive darkness eliminates the visual elements of exploration that are most fun. Even when you’re able to see beyond your immediate surroundings, the drab environments and templated monster camps make the entire underground blur together.
The way that the resources from each environment encourage a cyclical pattern of exploration is very elegant. Sundelions from the sky and Brightbloom Seeds from the caves make exploring the depths more convenient. The depths supply you with bombs to blast through caves, as well as zonaite which lets you build vehicles that last longer, especially helpful for hopping between the sky islands.
I would have had a smoother time with Tears of the Kingdom if its tutorial sequence were longer. The defining moment of Breath of the Wild is when, after completing the initial area, you descend into a world you’re free to explore however you choose. The sequel tries to replicate this, but its mechanics are more complex, so it opts to introduce several of them via questlines rather than bloat the tutorial. Loosed upon the world, I spent thirty minutes in one of my first shrines fruitlessly trying to assemble Zonai devices to cross a chasm before throwing in the towel, only to realize later that all I needed was the paraglider, gated behind one of the main questsI had just assumed the glider wouldn’t be returning and that Ascend, Ultrahand, and Zonai devices would fill its gap.. Likewise, I didn’t happen upon Josha’s quest that introduced Autobuild until over halfway into my playthrough, which would have made my early experiences with the building mechanic much more pleasant. Tears of the Kingdom prioritizes letting you do whatever you want, but with such core abilities locked behind easily missable quests, the game can at times feel instead like a linear one with poor signaling.
Tears of the Kingdom adopts the piecemeal temple style of Breath of the Wild – I still miss the build-up of a classic Zelda mega-dungeon – while omitting the kind of twist that made the Divine Beasts memorable: changing their form to solve the puzzles within.
I particularly enjoyed the Lightning Temple, with the short series of rooms leading up to the multi-floor light reflection puzzles. Colgera, the Wind Temple boss, is one of my favorites in the entire Zelda series; it’s thrilling to ascend and descend the field of wind currents to position yourself either above or below the boss’s weak points.
The overloaded controls too often had Link doing something I didn’t want: throwing my weapon instead of a Brightbloom Seed, activating the wrong sage’s abilityI died more than once by charging Yunobo into a bomb flower instead of collecting it., entering the bow selection menu instead of the weapon selection menu, or triggering the last selected ability instead of a new one from the wheel.
There’s so much to enjoy here – it’s more Breath of the Wild – but the game is not very respectful of your time. There aren’t quite enough meaningful rewards or diversity in tasks to justify the massive amount of content, and despite leaving many caves and shrines untouched, most small side quests unsolved, and much of the depths unexplored, I still felt encouraged to play past the point where the activities were intrinsically fun.